Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Committee on Financial Services, gave the following opening statement at a full Committee hybrid markup.
Today, this Committee will mark up four bills. As Chairwoman of this Committee, I am very pleased to advance several strong legislative solutions that have been introduced by Committee Democrats. These bills build on lessons learned during the pandemic to make us stronger and more resilient in the face of future stress events.
During the pandemic, we saw minority-owned businesses struggle to access PPP loans and struggle to keep their doors open. As our nation looks towards the long journey to recovery, we will need to ensure that minority-owned businesses have the support they need to re-open their doors. At this markup the Committee will consider a bill led by Representative Al Green, H.R. 2689, the “Minority Business Resiliency Act”, which codifies the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) into law to support and assist with the development of minority business enterprises and includes improvements and reforms to the MBDA to better support minority-owned business enterprises and rural minority business enterprises.
During the pandemic, we provided emergency support to our credit unions by enhancing the National Credit Union Administration’s Central Liquidity Facility and expanding it to cover more credit unions. This backstop helps ensure that credit unions experiencing an unexpected liquidity crunch, as they have faced in past crises, have access to liquidity support. The pandemic will not be the last crisis we face, so today we will also mark up my bill, the “Central Liquidity Facility Enhancement Act”, which would permanently extend enhancements for the CLF made in the CARES Act, which received bipartisan support. Extending these authorities will make our financial system more prepared in the face of future stress events.
As we highlighted during a recent hearing with the megabank CEOs, megabanks collected record profits during the pandemic in part by charging millions in overdraft fees from consumers who were struggling through no fault of their own. Today we will also mark up the “Greater Supervision in Banking (G-SIB) Act”, H.R. 3948, a bill by Representative Ayanna Pressley that would help bring greater transparency and accountability to these megabanks. Specifically, this bill would require U.S. global systemically important bank holding companies – or G-SIBs — to prepare detailed annual reports that will be published on the Federal Reserve’s website, including information about their size and complexity, more specifics about worker compensation, merger and acquisition activity, support for MDIs and CDFIs, steps being taken to reach climate emissions reduction targets, and steps taken to promote diversity and inclusion.
Finally, Congress successfully worked with the Biden Administration to provide stimulus payments to households struggling during the pandemic, but many who were unbanked or underbanked struggled to receive their checks. The “Municipal I.D.'s Acceptance Act”, H.R. 3968, a bill by Representative Ritchie Torres, would help reduce the number of individuals who are unbanked or underbanked by requiring guidance that clarifies that banks may accept municipally-issued IDs when verifying a customer’s identification.
So, I would like to thank the Members for their work on these important bills and look forward to passing them through the Committee.
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